All Play and No Work: A Response

Recently, the New York Timespublished an article about how today’s youth are opting to play video games instead of working. A (non-gaming) friend of mine commented to me that she thought it was interesting, after hearing about video games from my perspective, and after perusing some of the articles here. Maybe video games aren’t the rosy picture I make them out to be? she seemed to tentatively offer.

Well of course they’re not. They are no more rosy than any other storytelling or entertainment medium. Like any entertainment, or any leisure tool, they are helpful or harmfulbased on how you use them. Yes, you heard it here first and all that.

But what of this news article?

The Gist of It

I encourage you to read the above article for yourselves, but the theme of the article is that young people (read: millenials) are opting to play video games instead of work. What is more concerning to me is not so much the reporter writing the story, but the information he is reporting on.

Quoctrung Bui’s article reports on the findings of real economists: Erik Hurst, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Charles. These gentlemen take aim not at the external reasons why a blue-collar worker might not have a job, but rather decide to make a value judgment of that person’s character and try to find a personality flaw that keeps them from working.

The research cites various polls and surveys, and concludes that leisure time has increased by approximately two hours per week since 2014, with about 60% of that time now being spent on video games. For reference, that’s about an hour and change more per week (or 10 more minutes per day).

Now, this is a very broad summary of the article, but a few points to remember going forward are:

The increase of leisure time (about two hours per week)

The increase of video game playing time (about one hour more per week)

The insinuation that playing video games has caused an increase in leisure time

A distinct lack of analysis of any other factors that may lead to an increase in “leisure time” (aka time not spent at a place of employment)

So What?

Really, there’s no reason to even dignify Erik Hurst et al.’s research with a response, especially after reading through the comments of Mr. Bui’s article and seeing the swell of ground support not only for video games, but also the swell of average people pointing out all the flaws in the research.

At the end of the day, Mr. Hurst’s thoughts seem like just another “millenials are horrible” tune tied up with new wrapping paper. Worse, perhaps, is that it pulls in the wonderfully overused stereotype of the do-nothing gamer happily living in the basement of his parents. And Mr. Hurst seems to have a particular issue with technology, once using his 12-year-old boy’s statement about wanting to play video games for 23-and-a-half hours per day as a hook before talking about how unskilled laborers also like to play video games.

I have never stooped to insulting people here, but well done, sir. Your implication of comparing a 12-year old’s logic to that of a 20-year-old’s is astounding. Obviously both of these people have the same social pressures and responsibilities to get a job and be functioning human beings.

Your association of the two is, frankly, disgusting and insulting.

And personal vendettas have no place in research.

Point for Point

Now, Mr. Bui, the reporter from the New York Times, does comment that Mr. Hurst does not take into account globalization of the job market, shifting work force needs, or the economy, and to that I commend him. While I personally wished he would have emphasized that more, he was not writing an opinion piece, and could not expound on information he was not given. But the kernel of doubt was planted.

Workforce Numbers*

When it comes to sheer numbers, there are more people competing for jobs. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, since 1970, women in the workforce have increased from 43% to 60%, and men have decreased from 80% to 73%.

But, even with this influx of women, men have only experienced an 8% decrease for women’s 13% increase. So gender isn’t the main issue. No, what this starts to hint at is a much deeper problem: not enough jobs to go around.

Economy and Jobs Disappearing

The job landscape for young men, the target population for Mr. Hurst, is changing. Jobs available to blue-collar workers pay less in proportion to the cost of living than they once did ($15 per hour is the standard cost of living in my area, with minimum wage here being around $8.40). For perspective, in 1960, a bank teller made around $6,150, which is about $50,000 in today’s money. Today, the average salary of a teller is around $12 per hour, or about $25,000 per year.

So, today a person needs more than one so-called “unskilled job” to make a livable wage, but those jobs are disappearing/becoming automated. Wages are proportionately lower than in the past, and there are more people in the workforce.

The Big Bad Wolf

Now, unfortunately for us, Mr. Hurst and his colleagues don’t seem to address these issues. They don’t seem to address the possibility that at least some of the bums sitting around playing video games are unemployed/employed part-time because it may actually be difficult to get a job.

It’s not always a simple matter of finding something that gives you money. Sometimes you have physical constraints that limit what you can apply to do, sometimes you need a job to work around another job, sometimes you have a master’s degree and are labeled as “too qualified” because they can get the labor cheaper from someone else you’re flipping resumes and waiting to hear back from prospective employers. Sometimes the jobs don’t offer you as many hours as you needed or wanted.

Sometimes you just wind up with more time on your hands than you expected, or even wanted.

And maybe no one’s ever said this, but video games are sort of fun to play and make the endless hours of waiting for phone calls a little more bearable.

Additionally, Mr. Hurst and his colleagues do not take into account when this leisure time is occurring. Personally, I play video games in the middle of the night. I didn’t used to, but I can’t play games when the sun is up anymore for a variety of reasons, meaning my video game time cuts into my sleeping time, so… ta da, my leisure time has increased. While this may not account for everyone’s gaming time, if enough people do something like this, it would be enough to increase the average “leisure time” hours across a population.

But I digress.

Regardless of the complex issues surrounding gaining employment and the other influencing details that Mr. Hurst has apparently abandoned in favor of blaming technology for the disgusting lack of work ethic among millenials (which isn’t even true), there are two particular points that Mr. Hurst makes that should make any reader be wary.

The first is the fact that the 60% increase of video game playing occurred across a total of 2.4 hours increase of leisure per week. This means that people are playing a whopping 10 more minutes of video games per day.

The second point to consider is that, in spite of the average increase in leisure time…

Mr. Hurst does not show how playing video games CAUSES a person to have more leisure time.

All he establishes is that, of the newly-available time, most of it is spent playing games. And maybe, one day, perhaps, that could be a bad thing.

To quote Mr. Hurst:

How do we know technology is causing the decline in employment for these young men? As of now, I don’t know for sure. But there are suggestive signs in the data that these young, low-skilled men are making some choice to stay home. If we go to surveys that track subjective well-being—surveys that ask people to assess their overall level of happiness—lower-skilled young men in 2014 reported being much happier on average than did lower-skilled men in the early 2000s. This increase in happiness is despite their employment rate falling by 10 percentage points and the increased propensity to be living in their parents’ basement.

The points about happiness, contentment, living in basements, and not getting a job are tied together loosely at best, and he states himself that there is no research that shows video games cause people to not get jobs, other than his gut feeling about how happy people are even though they’re unemployed.

This quote is taken from a speech given at a college commencement, as if trying to separate the grads from the uneducated plebeians who waste away their 20s idly playing games without a care in the world.

I think this is a good time to repeat that ten minutes more gaming per day is not keeping anyone from landing a job.

Hell Hath No Fury Like an Internet Rant

So, to summarize, an economist and his friends wrote an article that examined how leisure time has been increasing over the past decade. That was linked to people working less. Over the past decade, time spent playing video games has also increased. Thus, the conclusion was drawn that video games have caused an increase in leisure time, which means that video games have thus caused unemployment.

How did this pass peer review? How can a person seriously claim that, because video games take up a majority of leisure time, they are somehow responsible for increasing the length of time itself?

How can you assume that because someone is unemployed, they are lazy and “choosing” to stay at home? This is the same logic that says that if a person cannot afford health insurance, it is therefore their “choice” to not have it.

Mr. Hurst’s article also doesn’t discuss that, at times, it’s more financially sound to live off of welfare than to work, because sometimes the amount of money given through our (USA) welfare program is more than a person will take home from a full-time, blue-collar job. So, while these gamers may be unemployed (and presumably looking for work), they are, in fact, unemployed, getting paid, and playing games in all of their free time.

And if a person abuses the welfare system, it’s not video games keeping them from working, is it? This is obviously an entirely different issue that may need to be addressed at some point, but it was not accounted for at all in the research.

Also glaringly absent is a discussion of a shrinking job market (especially in blue-collar work) and a growing workforce, or any mention of other economic concerns discussed above.

Perhaps worse, Mr. Hurst seems to dangerously blend the line between having a hobby and having an addiction. Playing a video game for leisure is fine, but being addicted to any activity that impacts you life is harmful, of course. But this isn’t what Mr. Hurst’s article discusses. Playing video games, Mr. Hurst and his colleague’s assert, are somehow automatically a sign of crippling addiction to technology.

I am disgusted by the premise of this research. To assert that a leisure activity causes detrimental behavior is something I’ve been talking about at length recently, so for Mr. Hurst’s research to claim that somehow video games caused more leisure time to exist is both annoying and utterly ridiculous.

Additionally, my leisure time is my own, regardless of how much of it I have. If I want to spend it playing video games, reading, or staring at a wall, it’s not any of your concern. Hobbies don’t cause laziness. Hobbies relieve stress. And, regardless of what your 12-year-old son says, sir, being unemployed and therefore able to do any leisure activity for 23-and-a-half hours is one of the most stressful economic concerns an adult can have.

Because that’s who we are. We are adults who play video games. We are not children trapped in adult bodies, playing with toys because we refuse to grow up. Kindly note the difference.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, this is just one more article using video games as a scapegoat for problems that exist at a societal level. Are there people who are addicted to video games? Yes. Will that keep them from getting a job? You bet.

But have video games been the single cause of an epidemic of young men forsaking getting a job in order to play ten more minutes every day?

No.

Frankly, to Mr. Hurst and all your colleagues, if you are going to consider an answer to a complex problem, you must consider all the pieces of the puzzle, not simply pick the one you hate for arbitrary reasons and then fix your research so the blame sits squarely and conveniently on its shoulders alone.

What do you think? Have I been too harsh on Mr. Hurst and his colleagues? Are young people really eschewing work simply to play more games? Or is there more at play here? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

I think you’ve covered most of the bases here – in terms of actually, like, refuting the (quote-unquote) “facts” – and highlighting some of the context too, but I’ma focus on the context a bit more. See, this is a part of the drip-drip-drip of a certain narrative that’s been around for a long time, but here it’s dressed up in slightly different clothes (because “hey, Video Games are an easy target anyways, right – let’s use them!?”) and, here’s the thing, it doesn’t need to be “true”, or “accurate” because it just needs to find traction with the right audience.

As you point out, it’s not so much putting the cart before the horse as it is sending the cart on an advanced mission to Mars whilst the horse stays home in the paddock. It’s ass-backwards, spurious and lazy thinking, but it’s *deliberate*, and it’s been an ideological tool in the Economist’s repertoire for at least three decades (see the “Welfare Queen” in the 80s, for example). If you can flip the reality to show an effect as a cause, you can essentially deflect blame from those causes onto the victim of those self-same causes, and if you do it often enough, it becomes the reality. In this case, if you can point at a result of an erosion of Worker’s Rights, Job Security, Job Availability, a fall in relative standards of living, an increase in the pay-gap, and the relative decrease in average wages and make *that* the cause of it, bish-bash-bosh…it’s their own fault, innit!? Nothing to do with all those factors way beyond their control, it’s because they *choose* to play Video Games (or watch TV/sit in a bar/whatever) instead of working non-existent jobs, or non-existent hours, or generally doing anything to “help themselves”.

Like I said, it’s Video Games here, but that’s just a convenient cause celebre to hammer home a particularly vile distorting of, like, reality and shit – and one that’s ultimately been around for quite a while.

You’re right, and we’ve seen that a lot recently. “Alternative facts” that are easy and convenient to digest are accepted and internalized, and not called out for the blatant lies that they are, no matter what.

It’s always easier to pick someone else to blame. I mean, why would an economist want to actually look at the economy and say that it’s the economy’s fault? No, obviously it’s… (spins Wheel of Excuses) the fault of video games! Yeah. That’s it. (rolls eyes). Ugh. It makes me so angry, and I hate that, time and again, PEOPLE DON’T LEARN that simple answers don’t solve complex problems, no matter how convenient it is to think they do.

I was made redundant a few years ago and since then I’ve only been able to hold down part time entry level retail jobs. And I really do mean part time, like eight hours a week contracts. I would have been better off unemployed and on welfare (which shouldn’t make sense) but I was too proud to accept hand outs, even though I was entitled to them.

I currently have two part time jobs and between the two I’m just shy of full time hours. Back when I only had one part time job though, the extended leisure time I had was anything but leisurely.

It was a constant worry of not making ends meet. I barely played video games because I simply couldn’t afford to. The irony is that now I have two jobs, which means less leisure time, I actually play games more because I can afford to do so.

Lengthy comments are always welcome! Especially when they are so thoughtful.

I think according to these economists, the reason for your work troubles would be that… um… wait you didn’t play video games during that time? Are you sure?

But you’re right, of course. Being unemployed is not a nice feeling (nor caused by gaming, as it’s a really expensive hobby!), and taking advantage of the welfare program is not caused by video games, either. I’m glad to hear you’re beginning to get some more work hours, and hope you’ll get the hours you need to support your needs!

Great summary of this, saved me from having to read his garbage. I don’t understand how this can be considered research. I thought research is supposed conclusions made from observations based on… You know… FACTS!

It’s mind boggling how this did get published and how it passed peer review. It seems as you said a more personal vendetta against his son. Well perhaps his son is playing 23 hrs a day to get away from his crazy ass hat of a dad. Maybe I should publish a paper on that? How kids play videogames because some dads are just dumb. Seems fair considering what his paper is based on.

I think it sucks the NY times posted it. I’m hoping they did not because they agree with it, but I’m hoping it’s to expose this fraud of a researcher or scientist or whatever he thinks he is. Clearly… He’s scum.

I’m glad to see our small army of the internet is doing their diligence to point out the obvious flaws in this paper. As you said 10 minutes extra a day, whoopdy f’n Doo!

In the end, everyone can try and bring gamers down, but gaming is only continuing to grow. People just need to realize if ones personal choice does not spell the answer for the entire human race.

It’s amazing the nonsense that gets published. His research itself seems sounds. He looks at how much leisure time, how many work hours, etc., etc., but his conclusions involve some, shall we say, fuzzy math.

I checked the article again. Apparently the late adopters seem to think this is an interesting concept because “they always suspected their children” were playing too many video games and that’s why they didn’t get a job. So… yeah. Ugh.

Gaming is only continuing to grow, and somehow the economy is managing to not crash as a result.

Reblogged this on Outlet: An Outlet for Inquisitive Minds and commented:
Despite my habit of regularly consuming video games, it has not stopped me from being an honor roll student with a schedule full of AP classes planned for the next school year or from working around twenty hours a week in addition to sports and other extracurricular activities.

With the older generation saying that millennials are too privileged and that we are lazy and conceited, I constantly feel the need to parade my achievements just to show them that we’re not the way they think. However, I am aware that this also throws a lot of my peers under the bus if they don’t manage to somehow fill in every hour of every day. We shouldn’t have to prove ourselves like this.

Furthermore, while this sort of attitude does affect me and people my age, the millennials who are older are getting it in a larger dose every day. While struggling with rent and student debt and the problems everyone has with first moving out, they are constantly being told that they are not good enough and that their troubles are of their own making because they were too coddled and naive. If people in the older generation are so eager to see millenials find their way in the world and be productive (which they really are not because they would have to find something else to criticise) then why would they make it so that the people they were supposed to be motivating are instead getting beaten down?

This is a post another millennial has written in response to one such attack on our work ethic and on what we decide to spend our leisure time on. She explains it much better than I did. Check it out.

Thanks! I love your comment on this, as well. I think there’s a lot at play here, from a general mistrust of millenials, to a mistrust of video games, to wanting an easy scapegoat, and thus… we have this article…

I was so hyped for this article when I caught your Twitter poll. I was not disappointed either! That was an awesome read and I loved how you used logic to crush this flawed NY Times article. I also pictured a globe with hands doing a “controller drop” at the end 🙂

It makes me so annoyed when I see video games being used as a scapegoat by idiots in the media, STILL. For one, being jobless really sucks and sometimes the circumstances are beyond your control. I could also go off on a rant about how games can actually teach you skills that are transferable into an IRL workplace. Sigh…

Yup. Dropped that controller right off the top of the New York Stock Exchange. haha

Yeah, and of course the economists don’t want to talk about how maybe they’re part of the problem, too. No no, it’s much easier to point fingers and disregard any benefit video games have, any other complexities that might cause people from getting work, etc etc…

It is mind boggling that the Times thought that reporting on this poorly constructed study, with such a click-baitish headline, was worth doing. And the fact that it doesn’t really give any actual proof that video games are in fact holding young men out of the workforce just kind of hurts my head.

Once again millenials are the whipping boys for something else. You can’t look at the state of the world now, and give advice based on its state 50 years ago. It doesn’t make any sense. Also correlation doesn’t equal causation. Ice cream consumption doesn’t cause murders (though I WILL murder someone for some chocolate chip cookie dough flavored #truth); they both go up in the summer. This article is just poor research, and it will just cause those who already deride that generation to nod their heads in agreement 🙄

It is definitely poor research, and as Aether mentioned, some of his data are just falsified, which boils my blood a little. And regarding the whole “living with your parents” thing, multi-generational homes were the norm up until right after World War II, and people did that for economic reasons. Of course, now millennials are having issues getting jobs, which is the difference, but the history is there for people living with family to ease their financial burdens. It’s 2017; we need to start taking realistic looks at the state of the world/country/economy.

Yes, I was a little disappointed, even as much as I like the NY Times. I realize they were just reporting on the material, but without any counterbalance, some folks will undoubtedly simply nod along knowingly…. sigh.

The term “Boomerang Generation” is pretty apt, and they’re mocked for it, but it’s not their fault the conditions are in place that make it necessary. It infuriates me, because you can’t create a situation and then blame and mock those who suffer due to the situation you created. And you’re right, multi-generational homes were very common and are still common in numerous cultures.

It’s why we need people like you and Aether to write responses. Chances are the people reading that tripe already think it, and while it’s annoying that they’re just going to swallow it, I seriously doubt it’s going to convince anyone who wasn’t already there in the first place.

If I may go on a tangent here, multi-generational homes could be a solution for the housing problems in plenty of big cities, but I don’t see any Boomers putting the blame on themselves for changing that. *grumble grumble*

Also, I wish Latin America had kept that custom of multi-generational homes. In the last 10 or 15 years it has become a stigma of sorts, people who chose or have to live with their parents or grandparents carry a stigma, as if they are overly attached or not economically successful for doing so (and those two things are another can of worms, I mean, what is to be “overly attached” or “successful” and why does it matter if others think so?).

Well, technically it wasn’t the Baby Boomers who built all the houses. Suburbs sprang up post WWII in order to accommodate the soldiers returning home and getting married. That was the so-called “Great Generation.”

I wish the USA had kept that custom, too. It’s a financially sound decision, and I think if you’re working and helping out the household, making a sound financial decision is not a problem. But ah, misguided social pressures….

You’re right about the Baby Boomers not being the ones to start the suburb insanity. That said, the greatest growth in suburbs happened in the last legs of the 20th century, so a little self-awareness from them would be nice.

Honestly, I am a tad bothered by everyone on their mother shifting the blame on the youngest generation. And I am sure a day will come when Millenials/Gen Y-ers start doing that with whoever comes next, because us humans are nothing if not predictable.

When we go to Art Fairs there is ALWAYS the NY Times
booth, with some awkward sales person trying to hock
newspaper subscriptions. Do they not realize people
get their news online? Wait, they are too busy insulting
the millennial demographic (which now has the largest
influence & buying power) Whoopsie better luck never.

To be fair, I do read the NY Times regularly and usually enjoy myself. This article just fell a little flat. Unfortunately, the caveat the journalist gave about Hurst not exploring other options will not be noticed by most people, and, as most millennials don’t read the Times, I’d imagine they haven’t hurt their subscription base, but rather just reinforced the ridiculous divide between generations.

Printing magazines & newspapers contributes to deforestation, which is totally unnecessary in the information age. It just doesn’t align with our core values. There are plenty of writers & journalists who could have written much more relevant & insightful material. We are bored of this millennial divide diatribe, it is so tired.

I read it online, to be honest. At any rate, to me, the most concerning part of this is not that the Times reported on it, but that there are researchers who took short cuts and laid blame on one facet of a society in an attempt to overly-simplify a complicated problem. The reporter was simply reporting on the research, which is his job.

I do agree that people taking shots at millennials is getting old, but we’re starting to see news articles and commentaries saying it’s not our fault the economy is bad, so that’s good, at least!

Yes, we are inheriting a hierarchy that was set in place almost 2 generations ago, & our world is changing more rapidly each year than in the last 100 years of history.

It is an exciting time to be alive, but also scary when the powers at be would rather be reactionary instead of proactive. (In economics, politics, social issues, & education) I remember watching Captain Planet as a child & though WOW, we are going to be the generation that stops all this pollution & endless war cycles. The media has a HUGE role in shaping our current paradigm, so to shift blame on us is irresponsible & honestly quite irritating.

The thing that makes economics so complicated is that it’s both a hard science and a soft science at the same time. That’s why you will get people who are very, very educated on the subject looking at the same stuff and seeing completely different pictures. You can’t draw strong conclusions in economics without using both sides of it. You need to study both cause and effect. I skimmed through the article and the paper until it started reminding me of what I have to do when I get back to work on monday, full time job thank you very much Hurst, but it seems to me that’s where the study really falls short. Data is data, I’ve got no dispute with what they’ve found, but the misstep comes in assigning utility to everything and ending the thought process there. Yes, utility is a pretty foundational economics concept, but it’s far from the only one, and making assumptions based on correlation and assignment of utility when you were already researching into living status and employment in the first place is pretty academically lazy. Thinking that people are working less because video games offer more competing utility than they used to without going into the behavioural considerations of someone making that choice is pretty lacking

Also, some of the supporting statements in the paper are completely falsified. Literally, I’ve got government studies and laws sitting on my work computer hard drive that countermand parts of their narrative, and the fact that my job exists at all contradicts one of the claims they make about government transfers. I’m not going to say that they’re wrong, we do not have a commonly accepted explanation for why working hours have reduced on this demographic, and I’m not one to knee-jerk fight something just because it calls video games into question. But I am going to say the authors of this paper should be ashamed of themselves for making facts up, and I’ve spent more time reading and thinking about their work than they deserve. I’m going to go play video games now. Apparently the amount of time people spend on that has increased by 60%, and I need to keep up.

I agree. I did read through Hurst’s paper and he really does make some interesting points, and if they existed in a vacuum I’d be more inclined to believing his stand. But, like I said, there are so many other(social) issues he just ignored in favor of pinning blame on one thing. I don’t care what that “thing” is, but that was unprofessional and lazy at best.

Ah, I don’t have the luxury of access to government data on my computer, but it just really boils my blood to think that he completely fabricated some of his support.

No, you’re right. While I can only imagine what your explanation is for decreased work hours, without some sort of cold, hard, conclusive data with causative conclusions, I’m not sure I’m ready to completely pin all my blame onto video games. However, if there is a problem that’s being exacerbated (or caused) by video games, I’d absolutely want to know about it, because then we – as a community – would need to stand up and be the adults we keep telling people we are, and try to change things.

I appreciate you chiming in, especially with your training and line of work (and therefore perspective) that I don’t have for this topic.

Ah, so they totally missed the correlation does not mean causation memo.

I understand there is some cause for concern when it comes to relying on anything in excess, but the premise that increasing leisure time is necessarily a bad thing is just so dumb. Especially when it is less than 10 minutes per day on average.

I wish I could be more articulate, but it just cheeses me off how for the last 5 or so years everything Generation Y/Millenials do is basically the reason the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. The worst thing is Baby Boomers and Gen X went through the same thing, that’s some selective memory right there.

To be fair, the Baby Boomers aren’t really the ones complaining. They’re the ones letting their millennial children move back in with them. Personally, I’ve gotten the most side-eyes from Gen X’ers. But I digress.

I’m not sure if you read Aether’s comment, but that researcher’s practices boil my blood even more now.

You’re right that the most complaints seem to come from Gen X-ers, at least in written media (mostly something or the other about being a coddled generation and some rants about participation awards). Thankfully I haven’t gotten any side-eyes from anyone in person, or I am too thick to notice!

That said, I do hear a lot of Boomers comment generally that they don’t get how Millenials aren’t settled (house, kids, the works) by the time they hit their late twenties. And I just don’t understand what is so bothersome about other people having different goals than you.

I did read Aether’s comments and there is definitely something to be said for the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

An excellent takedown, Ambi. I skimmed through the article in question and all I heard was “Millenials are to blame for all of this.” Plus, it just looks like an excuse to stoke older generation’s fury towards the younger generation.

Seriously, I’m getting kinda tired of us Millennials being blamed for the ills of the world :p.